Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
- Subject: Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
- From: David B.Gustavson <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:06:33 -0700
At 5:37 AM +0100 2007/06/22, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
I feel more comfortable now!
etc.
I think it's important that you realize before you start that some
aspects of AppleScript are intrinsically DIFFICULT and nobody should
feel bad if they need help.
In a way, that's good--it means that coding AppleScript for most of
us is inherently a social activity, because there's nearly always
some aspect of whatever we want to do that isn't well documented, and
doesn't work the way we'd expect it to, so we have to consult a group
like this (great) one!
AppleScript is easy in some ways, once you get enough experience with
it. But it's kind of a read-only language! (Most languages I've had
experience with over a long career are more write-only: the author
can express what he wants to do and make it happen, but nobody else
can understand what he was thinking without a lot of work, and even
the author can't remember how to read his program after a while).
With AppleScript, it generally seems easy to read a working program
and figure out what it is doing, and often it's easy to modify it a
little to do what you want. It kind of reads like English.
But writing a program from zero is really hard, because some of the
details of what you have to write depend on details of which
application you are scripting, and though there's some system and
uniformity to how applications behave in general, the details can
differ a lot, in ways that aren't obvious. Once you have a lot of
experience, you can usually think of the likely variety of ways that
might work to achieve your goal, but often you have to ask a large
group like this "has anyone figured out how to make application Blah
do bletch...?"
So, given the history you shared with us, I think it's important that
you realize that when things don't work at first, you should not take
it personally. It's not your fault--AppleScript really does require
certain phrasings sometimes that you're unlikely to be able to guess
or to find in any documentation. They're like magical incantations.
Try several things, experiment, read similar example programs, and
ask for help.
In some ways, AppleScript is one of the hardest languages to master.
Other languages are more self-contained, in the sense that they are
thoroughly documented (and the documents can be found), and their
behavior is less dependent on the vagaries of the various
implementations of other pieces of software. For example, I recently
learned PHP and MySQL programming, and though it's a very rich
environment with great power, it seems to me much easier than
AppleScript.
On the other hand, playing with AppleScript on the Mac can be
rewarding, because the results are immediate and, one hopes, useful
to you. I've found Script Debugger to be very helpful...
Dave G
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